


Needful Things

by icarus_chained



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Horror, Anthropomorphic, Biology, Dimension Travel, Lovecraftian, M/M, Mathematics, Monsters, Prompt Fic, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-24
Updated: 2013-08-24
Packaged: 2017-12-24 13:18:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/940441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt had thought that the Anteverse would be the most terrible thing he encountered in the Drift. He was wrong. Some horrors are ever so much closer to home.</p>
<p>Lovecraftian Newt/Hermann AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Needful Things

**Author's Note:**

> For the [prompt](http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/1613.html?thread=2651213#t2651213): There have been several cool prompts about Newt not being human, but personally I've always loved stories where the understated person is the inhuman one. Because what better cover is there than being so boring and stuffy that nobody would suspect your of having any otherworldly secrets? So, could we get some not!human Hermann stories going on here? Please?

There were things that existed in the gaps between realities. Things that blossomed into sapience only when worlds collided, things that emerged to hide strange eyes behind familiar, shapeless faces. Some called them the Eaters of Souls. Others called them Eaters of Worlds. This was, in a sense, only a semantic difference.

Others, a rare few, called them mathematicians. Those ones were both further and infinitely closer to the truth.

"What _are_ you," Newton breathed, a biologist's prayer from a man with a mathematician's name, and Hermann smiled crookedly at him. Less the crookedness of sentiment, perhaps, and more the crookedness of no longer quite wearing the correct face. Newton, as ever, did not flinch the way he should have.

"A mathematician," Hermann answered, with that twitchy little quirk of his lips that _was_ , in fact, a smile, and always had been. For a moment, Newton almost puffed up in annoyance, in the snarl of familiar temper at the non-answer, the absurd grandeur of angry insignificance. For one familiar, delightful moment, Newt opened his mouth to snap. 

Then, abruptly, he deflated. Simply staring at Hermann, old patterns crushed beneath the wonder and terror of what he had seen.

A void between worlds. A vast and alien intelligence. The mathematical construction of universes laid bare in stark, intrinsic horror, beautiful and infinitely fragile against the rapacious intellect that hungered to devour them.

Also the Anteverse. That had been in there somewhere too.

"Hermann," Newt said softly. It was a rebuke, and a plea, and also an insistent demand from a creature who simply _must_ have knowledge, who feasted on it as surely, if less literally, as any of Hermann's own kind. It was _wonderful_ , that demand. It was a mad, incessant hunger, a reckless need that clawed through realities rife with horror to scour out some scrap of meaningful defiance, and it was the closest thing to continuity, to covalency, that Hermann had ever found.

In the face of it, in the face of Newt, he couldn't help but relent.

"You saw what I am," he murmured, an odd hum in his voice, tonal harmonics that echoed like breaches, a data point towards the inevitable conclusion. "Newton. You _know_ what I am."

Voidful, Breach-born, holding universes inside his head. Tapping them out on a vast, dark canvas, capturing realities inside fragile calcite accretions, building them in his hands and his numbers and his words until the simpatico was completed and the bridge was born and _worlds_ , bright, beautiful universes, collapsed screaming down the throat of his intellect.

There had been no Hermann before the kaiju, before the Breach. There had been no Gottlieb, no gods-love, before chittering biologists had constructed a vast mathematical edifice and called down, called _out_ , those things that blossomed and hungered and devoured in the spaces between worlds. They had called him. The Anteverse, the kaiju and their builders. In the building of a Breach, they had _summoned_ him. 

And he had worn a human face to devour them, to build his bridge across and drink their universe down. Human, because opposites must attract and whimsy must be placated. Human, because the devourer must always be placed outside the devoured, in the interests of sanity and hygiene and simple good manners. Human ... because he had felt an echo of his hunger, a knowing, desperate, defiant intellect, and sweet as universes were, that had been more tempting still. 

Human, because a biologist had whispered a mathematician's prayer, and forged a second bridge simply to find out what was there.

"You reached across voids, you stupid man," Hermann hummed, stepping close to trail fragile calcite fingers across Newt's hungry, terrified skin, to write the words of gods on that canvas and wash out the stains of lesser beings, the swirled inks of demons who had bitten off so very much more than they could chew. "I was so close. Only an interval away from them. But you just _had_ to know, you _had_ to see, and before I knew it you had reached across worlds to peer at them before I could wipe them away. So I had to follow you. I had to _show_ you. And now ..." He sighed, leaned close, frail bones against the void. "Now, Newton, you know _precisely_ what I am. Don't you."

"Oh _god_ ," Newt whispered, harsh and terrified against him, the infinite horror of pure knowledge. Hermann smiled in pained amusement, for a moment more frail than any Eater of Souls should ever be, and then ... 

Then there were fists clenched in the cloth at his back, painted hands that spread themselves and bit furiously into the voids cupped between his vertebrae, and all at once Newton _kissed_ him. Hard and desperate and hungry, fear and love and angry defiance, and oh, it was a taste sweeter than souls and all the wine-dark seas between universes.

"I want to be there when you eat them," Newt rasped, vicious and bloody into Hermann's mouth, capturing a void-born universe between his hands, mathematics within the intricate, fragile cage of his biology. "I want to be inside your _head_ , Hermann. I want to feel you drink those fuckers down."

And he meant it, he meant it in all those bright-dark electric spaces in his head that Hermann had never needed a Pons to breach, he meant it with a shining, defiant faith that embraced the breaking of worlds and the eating of souls and the clean, pure light of a god's dark love, and by all the souls in darkness, Hermann had never hungered for anything more, nor ever been so terrified.

"Newton," he warned, stammering and strainingly careful, a fragile skin over something vast and terrible. "Newt. I would own you then for sure."

The answer came immediately, bright and terrible and irritatingly, infuriatingly blasé, even here, even now. Newt pulled back, just enough to grin at him, just enough to smile shaking and brilliant and brave into Hermann's maw, and reached out to etch his words in calcite across that vast canvas.

_Fortune favours the brave, Hermann. And, for the record?_

_I totally owned you first._

**Author's Note:**

> Um. I haven't actually seen Pacific Rim yet: I'm working off recaps and screencaps mostly. I was just feverish and crazy last night and wrote a fill for a kinkmeme prompt for a canon I don't really know. Um. My apologies -_-;


End file.
